The Chinese Room has established a reputation as one of the most creative and exciting studios in the UK. We're proud to be internationally recognised as pioneers of storytelling with a flair for creating atmospheric, rich and imaginative games.

As a Sumo Digital studio, The Chinese Room is built on passion, on finding amazing people and letting them shine. It's an exciting time to be part of Sumo, winners of the Develop: Star Awards 2019 Best Studio; big things are on the horizon. If this sounds like a place where you'd like to make games, then we'd love to hear from you.

The role @ The Chinese Room

The Chinese Room is looking to expand our core teams experience and has a fantastic opportunity for a Senior VFX artist.

As a candidate you must be passionate about all aspects of VFX design and implementation, with the ability to create dazzling effects, within technical restrictions and that aid in gameplay immersion.

The ideal candidate will have a history of demonstrating an exceptional eye for detail, creative flair, stylistic versatility and the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate on artistic and technical aspects with other team disciplines.

If you can produce VFX from the magical to the mundane, from the stylistic to the realistic, from the current gen to the next gen, we have the right team, the right opportunity and a wide variety of game genres for you to work in.

Within this role you will:

Use your command over aesthetics and physics to create real world VFX;
Collaborate with designers, artists and coders to design and implement those VFX;
Take ownership and responsibility of your output;
Willingness to muck-in, and will support other team members;
Optimize your VFX to budget, test, measure and strive to improve performance;
Contribute to new techniques and workflows;
Work under direction to create stunning VFX, optimised per platform, across multiple titles
Create protoypes and pre-visualisation concepts to help establish visual effects direction and workflows
Collaborate with level design and gameplay teams to create visual effects that support gameplay requirements
Be up to date on current and emerging visual effect trends and technology
Create clear and accurate technical documentation regarding VFX production and implementation procedures
Work with the Graphical Rendering team/Technical Art team in the development and improvement of workflows and technologies to improve visual effect quality and performance.
Work through all aspects of the VFX pipeline, which includes creating content from concept to final polished result
We need you to have:

A minimum of 5+ years' experience in Real Time VFX for Video Games
Expert understanding of real-time VFX authoring tools
Experience with 3D packages for creating 3D assets
Strong knowledge of Photoshop and After Effects
Strong and demonstrable understanding of the Principles of Real Time VFX
Understanding of VFX impact on console performance
Highly passionate and self-motivated to create high quality VFX
Shipped at least 1 AAA title
Ability to communicate and mentor other VFX artists in the team
The ability to work with various styles of art on multiple projects
Demo reel required
Experience with UE4 (Cascade and Niagara)

We'd also ideally like you to have (although it's not a deal breaker):

Very strong problem-solving skills for technically challenging tasks
Experience in Unity (Shuriken), PopcornFX and other game engines for creating real time VFX
Experience with fluid dynamics simulation software, such as Houdini and FumeFX, for fire, smoke, fluid and soft/rigid body dynamics